---
name: trust-governance-and-ethics
description: "Trust, Governance and Ethics: 7 concepts, no maths assumed."
version: 1.0.0
author: Learn AI
license: CC-BY-4.0
metadata:
  hermes:
    tags: [Trust, Governance, And, Ethics]
    related_skills: [data-engineering-and-analytics, deep-learning, llms-and-generative-ai, security-and-privacy]
    source: https://basavapurushottam.com/learn-ai
---
# Trust, Governance and Ethics

7 concepts, written for an adult with no computer science and no mathematics past school arithmetic. Each concept is a file under `references/`; load one when it is the thing being asked about rather than reading the whole domain.


## When to Use

- The reader asks about trust, governance and ethics and wants it explained from the ground up rather than summarised.

- A term below comes up and you want the plain-language account of it, with a worked example.

- You need to know what a concept rests on before teaching it — every reference lists its prerequisites.


## When NOT to Use

- The reader wants current events, papers or library documentation. This is a curriculum, not a news source, and it does not update itself.

- The reader wants code they can ship. Examples here are written to be understood, not deployed.


## How to Run

Open the file listed beside a concept in Quick Reference below. The files live in the `references` directory, are plain Markdown with no front matter and no dependencies — read the one you want and ignore the rest.


## Quick Reference


### Fairness and Bias

- `references/black-box-vs-white-box-assessment.md` — **Black-Box vs White-Box Assessment**: Assessing from outputs alone versus with full access to weights, data and training proc…
- `references/perturbation-robustness.md` — **Perturbation Robustness**: Measuring how much a system's output changes when inputs are varied in ways that should…
- `references/protected-attributes.md` — **Protected Attributes**: Characteristics such as race, gender, age or disability that law and ethics restrict fr…
- `references/sentiment-and-emotion-bias.md` — **Sentiment and Emotion Bias**: Systematic differences in how sentiment and emotion models score text associated with d…
- `references/trust-rating-scales.md` — **Trust Rating Scales**: Expressing an assessment of a system's trustworthiness as a comparable graded score.

### Model Interpretability

- `references/activation-patching.md` — **Activation Patching**: Deliberately altering internal activations during a forward pass to test whether a comp…
- `references/counterfactual-explanations.md` — **Counterfactual Explanations**: Explaining a decision by stating the smallest change to the input that would have flipp…


## Pitfalls

- The concepts are ordered by what rests on what, not by difficulty. A later concept is not always harder; it is later because something else has to come first.

- Explanations avoid notation the reader has not met. If you reintroduce standard symbols, say what they mean, or you undo the thing this curriculum is for.


## Verification

`ls references/ | wc -l` should print 7.


---

From [Learn AI](https://basavapurushottam.com/learn-ai). Prose is licensed CC BY 4.0.
